Death

I have not yet seen someone die, although many of my classmates have. I may when I am on inpatient IMED or surgery.

I have only seen little signs of death. As I was walking out of the hospital to my car, I once saw a hearse pull up to the building where I know the pathology lab is. I guess the morgue is down there, in the basement. The hearse was pulled up into a place where dumpsters were. That made me sad, that the body of the deceased person was among the trash.

My second brush with death just occured, only a few minutes ago. I'm sitting in the student lounge (I'm supposed to be studying), and a few minutes ago I heard sobbing outside the door. I debated about whether to ignore it, but I went out after a moment and found two women, one weeping and one crying loudly. I asked what was wrong.

The weeping woman wiped her eyes and said, "my brother's back there," pointing to the third-floor ICU located behind the student lounge. After I asked whether I could do anything for them and offered to pray, I went back into the lounge. Twenty or so minutes later (now) I heard new, loud cries from the same place, joined by a man. And I prayed for the man's soul. I don't know if he had died, but he may have. Please pray for the departed of this hospital and all hospitals today!

Medical Symbols

According to Aristotle, followed by the Church with St. Thomas, our bodies are the matter informed by our souls. Scott Hahn makes a similar analogy when he says "our bodies are symbols of our souls."

There are a lot of medical conditions that speak volumes about our souls. Here are just a few. (Note: this is never to say that people with these conditions have the analogous spiritual state; some conditions are heritable or acquired by actions whose objective morality no outside person can judge.)

Heterotopic heart transplant

Donor heart on left; patient's original heart on right.

Occasionally, patients with heart failure are candidates for a heterotopic graft. This means that the patient's heart is not removed and a donor heart is hooked up next to it to share the load of pumping. The person has two heartbeats. This can be done in heart failure is due to severe lung disease, or when the patient's heart might recover (at which point the donor heart would be removed, and the person would have one heartbeat again).

You know when you're trying to acquire a virtue, but your heart just isn't in it? You get up when your alarm rings not because you're excited about being disciplined for God or for others, but begrudgingly. You think to yourself, "my emotions aren't aligned with the right thing, my nature is fallen. I'm trying to become virtuous by replacing the wrong thought (snoozing) with the right one (getting up) and whipping up my emotions artificially. Boy, does this feel fake."

Eventually, virtue grows as you acquire the habit of getting up. And eventually, maybe you'll be like Mother Teresa, whose emotions and will were so aligned with God's will (who so had the virtue of charity) that it pained her not to go and help the dying.

But until then, you fake it. Your disease is so severe that your heart can't agree with the right thing to do, and you're attracted to evil. But God helps you with actual grace, pumping you up to be virtuous until your own heart is so transformed into His that it beats in synchrony, and you want the good.

There is one other symbol that I find particularly striking: syphilis. This includes graphic pictures, but no explicit images.